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| Guy Pène du Bois (USA) The Confidence-man 1919 oil on panel Brooklyn Museum |
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| Kolomon Moser (Austria) The Wayfarer ca. 1914 oil on canvas Leopold Museum, Vienna |
"The creation of visual art is a contest with nature, not a desire for interchangeability with nature. Man can never produce a perfect illusion or counterfeit of nature. This is true with regard not only to animate natural beings, whose life breath the human creator cannot infuse into dead matter, but even to the shapes of dead matter itself. If a crystal were to be artificially reproduced with the most meticulous accuracy, for example, microscopic investigation would still instantly reveal the arrangement of its most minuscule parts to be incompatible with those of a natural crystal. Even in those works of art that strive explicitly to mimic the superficial impression of natural appearances (Impressionist landscape paintings, for instance) the desire for illusion is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means to accomplish the primary aesthetic goal: to demonstrate man's ability to conjure up a particular visual effect of nature. In so doing, the work of art does not seek to replicate actual nature – on the contrary; if the work were not immediately recognizable as a product of human hands, it would lose its entire purpose. Behind every work of art, then, we must presuppose the presence of a work of nature (or several such) with which the work of art is designed to compete. It must be stressed that the human creator need not be conscious of that intent."
– from Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, a course of lectures delivered by Aloïs Riegl in 1899 at the University of Vienna, translated by Jacqueline E. Jung and published in English by Zone Books in 2004
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| Ferdinand Hodler (Switzerland) The Sacred Hour ca. 1902-16 oil on canvas Cincinnati Art Museum |
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| Jean-Louis Forain (France) Backstage―Symphony in Blue before 1923 oil on panel Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan |
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| Eugène Jansson (Sweden) Self-portrait 1910 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Lovis Corinth (Germany) Cain 1917 oil on canvas Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Childe Hassam (USA) April (The Green Gown) 1920 oil on canvas Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina |
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| Edvard Munch (Norway) Consul Christen Sandberg 1901 oil on canvas Munch Museum, Oslo |
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| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Germany) Seated woman in studio 1909 pastel and ink on paper Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Carl Fredrik Hill (Sweden) Untitled before 1911 crayon and coal on paper Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden |
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| Max Klinger (Germany) Nude 1910 gouache Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Wilhelm Lehmbruck (Germany) Standing youth 1912 watercolor Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Georg Pauli (Sweden) Mens sana in corpore sano 1912 oil on canvas Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden |
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| Thomas Wilmer Dewing (USA) Lady in Gold ca. 1912 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum |
THURSDAY
I have had my dream – like others –
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky –
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose – and decide to dream no more.
– William Carlos Williams (1921)